Samir Azzouz is only 19, but for almost three years Dutch authorities have struggled without success to punish him for what they see as plotting terrorism.
Police records show that he was first placed under surveillance in early 2003, when he was in high school, after he was stopped at the Ukrainian border while trying to join Islamic militants in Chechnya.
He was arrested months later in Amsterdam but released in days for lack of evidence. Arrested again in June 2004 on terrorist-related charges, he was convicted only of weapons possession. The police had found an array of materials that could be used to make bombs at his home in Amsterdam, including detonators and a yellow plastic lemon juice bottle, with bits of fertilizer inside, attached to a Christmas tree bulb.
They had also discovered crude hand-drawn sketches of some of the Netherlands' most important symbols of power, including the Parliament, the Amsterdam airport, the Ministry of Defense and the Dutch nuclear reactor, as well as CD's, videos and Internet sites showing how to make explosive devices.
In October, prosecutors arrested him for a third time, with new evidence, and will put him and six others on trial.
The prosecution says it is confident that its case is strong this time. But since no terrorist act was committed, it faces a tough challenge: proving that Mr. Azzouz's seeming intentions constituted crimes.
The problem resonates throughout Europe, as investigators and prosecutors grapple with how to stop what appear to be terrorist plots that are still being planned. Preventive detention in the face of a perceived threat is a useful but limited tool.
The difficulty also has echoes in civil liberties disputes roiling the United States, but it is particularly acute in the Netherlands, with its tradition, extending for decades, of protecting the rights of the individual against the intrusion of the state.
"People with intentions cannot be convicted if there is no link with transforming their intentions into action," the Dutch justice minister, Jan Piet Hein Donner, said in an interview. "Otherwise, I'd be convicting people for their ideas."
Dutch authorities say the learning curve has been steep in their prosecution of terrorist cases since the daylight murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh last year, for which Muhammad Bouyeri, a Dutch-born 27-year-old of Moroccan descent, was convicted.
The government was severely criticized for not having put Mr. Bouyeri under tighter surveillance despite signs that he was dangerous. Theo Bot, the deputy director of the national intelligence service, the country's intelligence and main antiterrorism service, said on television in May that it was "gut-wrenching" to have to admit that "someone was incorrectly evaluated from the beginning."
The murder shattered the image of the Netherlands as a tolerant haven immune to terrorism by Islamic radicals and prompted the passage of a law that makes it a crime to be a member of a "terrorist" organization.
The case of Mr. Azzouz has been particularly frustrating for prosecutors. In the case against him in 2004, prosecutors had records of chat-room conversations on the Internet in which Mr. Azzouz vowed to kill non-Muslims in the Netherlands and proclaimed his support for the violent overthrow of the Dutch government and its replacement with a government of Islamic law.
Besides the sketches of what appeared to be targets, the police raid of his home turned up homemade detonators, a pellet gun, a silencer, night-vision goggles, a bulletproof vest, ammunition clips, fertilizer, chemicals and handwritten lists of where to buy fertilizer.
The police also found a signed, handwritten letter from Mr. Azzouz to his expected child, expressing the hope that if the child was a boy, he would pursue jihad and go to a training camp when he turned 15.
Prosecutors and much of the public were stunned in April when a panel of judges acquitted Mr. Azzouz of plotting attacks. Adding to the frustration was Mr. Azzouz's smiling, triumphant appearance before his friends and reporters on the day of his release, before he suddenly turned angry and punched a photographer.
Prosecutors appealed, but an appeals court upheld the acquittal in November. It ruled that although Mr. Azzouz had "terrorist intentions," his preparations were "in such an early stage and so clumsy and primitive that there was no concrete threat."
Now the authorities have charged Mr. Azzouz and six others with conspiring to attack the Parliament and the intelligence service headquarters and to assassinate several politicians, including leading members of Parliament.
This time, the case rests largely on evidence gathered via wiretaps and telephone taps and monitoring of Mr. Azzouz's computer. Police agents also followed him so closely that he could see who was tailing him.
One secret intelligence report prepared by the Dutch intelligence service in October cited evidence that Mr. Azzouz was looking for money, explosives and weapons to commit a suicide bombing, according to the Dutch national television channel, NOVA, an account verified by Dutch authorities.
Another report by the service asserted that there was "reliable information" that he had a "central role in planning and preparing" an attack on a public building.
The authorities also have a video made by Mr. Azzouz that the authorities say is similar to those often made by suicide bombers. Dressed in black and wearing a black headband, Mr. Azzouz tells his family that his was "the right path." He tells the Dutch people that they are responsible for crimes by the United States, adding that there will be "revenge," since "you are considered soldiers because you elected this government."
Victor Koppe, his lawyer, said he planned to challenge the use of intelligence reports in court. He will also argue that while Mr. Azzouz's views may be extreme, they are not criminal. "Intentions," he said, "are not crimes."
The challenge of prosecuting intentions is playing out in a landmark terror case that went to trial in the Netherlands on Dec. 5, the first case under a new antiterrorism law making it a crime to belong to a terrorist organization.
That case involves 13 young men, including Mr. Bouyeri and some friends of Mr. Azzouz. The intelligence service code named them the "Hofstad group." Hofstad means royal seat. And prosecutors hope to convict them on charges of conspiring to commit acts of terrorism against the Dutch state. Their case relies on electronically monitored conversations, Internet exchanges and the testimony of others.
[Mr. Azzouz testified on Dec. 21, The Associated Press reported, telling the judges: "We reject you. We reject your system. We hate you. I guess that about sums it up."]
Prosecutors say they have the strongest case against Jason Walters, a 20-year-old Dutch-American who is also being charged with attempted murder, accused of throwing a hand grenade from his apartment at a special police team that had come to arrest him and his roommate, another defendant.
Mr. Walters has sworn in court he was only trying to act cool when he bragged about weapons training in Pakistan and rattled off names of politicians who should be killed.
"You create a myth and you keep building on it," he said of his Internet chats monitored by Dutch intelligence.
"People have a romantic idea about jihad fighters," he added. "I didn't have a job at the time. So I looked for things to make life a little more exciting."
But the cases against the others, all of whom are 20 to 28 years old, may be weaker. Ten of the defendants are being prosecuted only because they are accused of having an "association" with a terrorist group. Defense lawyers argue that a number of the suspects did nothing more than attend meetings where radical ideas were expressed.
Much of the prosecution's case rests on information gathered from the Dutch intelligence service which bugged the apartment of Mr. Walters and his roommate. Defense lawyers and the Dutch media have accused the service of a cover-up because it introduced only a small part of the intercepted conversations into the trial. Robert Maanicus, Mr. Walters's lawyer, said mysterious beeps were in the tapes in evidence, which he said signaled additional gaps.
"The intelligence services tell us that nothing else is relevant," Mr. Maanicus said. "That's rubbish."
Some terrorism specialists see the Hofstad members as radical misfits, braggarts and petty criminals, but not necessarily terrorist plotters. Some of the young men apparently did not know one another.
"They were dangerous because they had this romantic feeling to use violence to create a new Islamic state," said Ruud Peters, a professor of Islamic law at the University of Amsterdam who has testified as an expert witness at their trial. "They were amateurs because they were not part of a well-organized group of terrorists and their skills in military things were mainly collected through the Internet."
Even before the opening of the trial in early December, prosecutors had to scale back their goals, dropping charges that the group was trying to kill several Dutch politicians because the evidence did "not clearly prove" a planned attack, the prosecution said. Now they are trying to prove that the suspects formed a conspiratorial cell that took its inspiration from Mr. Bouyeri, who is serving a life sentence for killing Mr. van Gogh. In a court appearance on Dec. 7, he insisted, as he had earlier, that he had acted alone.
When asked whether he had met in his home with the other suspects, Mr. Bouyeri replied, "It's none of your business!" He added, "I am not going to tell you who came to my house, and I am not asking you who visits you."
Meanwhile, the justice minister is struggling to push through legislation to give new powers to investigators and the police and to allow intelligence reports to be more easily used in trials.
Under investigative procedures recently put in place, investigators and the police have begun to do what they call "disturbing" people to deter them from joining radical groups. It is a kind of harassment that involves following people at close range, calling them by telephone, parking police cars in front of their homes and approaching them on the street to inform them that they are being watched.
But civil liberties can still trump security in the Netherlands. Early in December, a young Muslim mother of three from Amsterdam identified only as Jolanda W. won a ruling against police officers she had accused of stalking her.
"One cannot rule out that these measures put important psychological pressure upon the person harassed," Judge A. J. Beukenhorst said in his ruling. "Islamic belief," he added, "cannot by itself be the reason for harassment." |
The Amsterdam appeal court on Thursday jailed Samir Azzouz for nine years for membership of a terrorist organisation, plotting attacks on political targets and for recruiting people for the armed struggle against 'the enemies of Islam', NOS tv reports. The public prosecution department had called for a 15-year sentence.
The women of the Dutch extremist network were a new breed of holy warriors on the front lines where Islam and the West collide. In the male-dominated world of Islamic extremism, they saw themselves as full-fledged partners in jihad. Wives watched videos about female suicide bombers, posed for photos holding guns and fired automatic weapons during clandestine target practice.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - Authorities detained seven suspects in an anti-terrorism operation Friday in three Dutch cities, including the capital, officials said. The suspects, ranging from 18- to 30-years-old, were detained in The Hague, Amsterdam and Almere. They will be brought before an investigating judge Monday.